Posted on 01/22/2013 5:59:01 AM PST by Kaslin
He swore his oath of office on Abraham Lincoln's Bible. He has asked to give the State of the Union address on Lincoln's birthday. He rode to Washington in 2009 on a train route similar to Lincoln's in 1861. He has compared his critics to Lincoln's critics. He confides to admirers that he likes to read the handwritten Gettysburg Address that hangs in the Lincoln Bedroom.
Barack Obama is inviting the world to compare him not just to good presidents but to the greatest in American history.
There can be majesty in invoking past presidents and the Founding Fathers. But Obama's quotations and allusions in his inaugural address served only to highlight the flatness of his own prose. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," he intoned, repeating the echoing words of the Declaration of Independence. What followed was: "Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they've never been self-executing." Clunk. "Self-executing" is a word best left to legal documents. It has as much poetry as a filing cabinet. As for "never-ending journey," it's a phrase that belongs in the juvenile fiction section -- if there.
Obama's second inaugural poached lines from Lincoln's speeches. The effect was like inserting snatches of Mozart into a Mariah Carey song. Obama said: "Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free." He was paraphrasing two Lincoln quotes -- one from the Cooper Union speech and this one, from the second inaugural: "Yet if God wills that it continue until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said: 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"
Obama's speech also seemed to allude to Lincoln's message to Congress before signing the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln said: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. ... As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." Obama, able to wring banality from the best material, said: "But we have always understood that when times change, so must we, that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges, that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action." Clunk.
Bounding from bromide to platitude, Obama alighted on his true theme -- to excoriate his opponents and to deny that choices must be made between providing lavish welfare state benefits and ensuring the prosperity of future generations. Deploying well-worn campaign themes, he slashed away at straw men: "We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky or happiness for the few." And: "We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war." And: "For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts."
In the midst of the worst crisis the United States ever faced -- with hundreds of thousands of soldiers already dead, thousands more wounded and the outcome uncertain -- Lincoln found it within himself to be charitable and humble. Of the contending sides in the Civil War, he said: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged."
Though he could have been excused for a certain moral superiority -- he was fighting the slave power, after all -- Lincoln instead proclaimed, "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations."
Lincoln did not strut. He was too wise. Obama's attempt to lasso Lincoln's legacy for his narrow partisan ends reveals that he doesn't even understand Lincoln's greatness, far less partake of it
Lincoln was devisive enough to oversee a domestic civil war. Obaba perhaps is signaling the same?
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Even the liberal pundits over the weekend didn't think he'd be this crass. They expected this in the SOTU next month. Inaugerations are supposed to be uplifting affairs, and Zero's idea of "uplifting" is continuing to bash, bash and bash.
Obama’s “Lincoln-esque” priority checklist:
1) Suspend habeas corpus
...coming soon, IMO.
I’ve seen some recent writers saying that was a legitimate use of presidential power during wartime. I think there was a group of English nobles back in 1215 who might beg to differ.
DUFUS ALERT!
I respectfully disagree.
FMCDH(BITS)
This speech was an abomination.
Talk about delusional. He is the worst president of all times
Who?
I won't argue that obama is shaping up to be the worst, I argue that Lincoln was not "the greatest", that's all.
FMCDH(BITS)
Barack Obama is inviting the world to compare him not just to good presidents but to the greatest in American history.
BWAhahahahahahahahaha....
I just sent him 2 tickets to the ford theatre.
Lincoln...who determined once and for all that we would have a powerful central government and state sovereignty be damned...was the beginning of the end.
Obama is the end.
didn’t the communists use lincoln during the spanish civil war?
I know there was the lincoln brigade in the old tv miniseries called “Amerika”.
There were two battalions of American volunteers fighting for Republican Spain, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and the George Washington Battalion. Losses were heavy, so the two were merged and came to be known as the Lincoln-Washington Battalion. In looking back they came to be known as the Lincoln Brigade, though that wasn’t actually correct.
There is a Lincoln Center in Havana which I believe is dedicated to the Lincoln Brigade which fought on the side of the communists in the Spanish Civil War.
And......he upstaged Martin Luther King. MLK day became Obamas day, you have to laugh at the irony.
It's all coming together!
The conspiracy must be bigger than we've ever dreamed!
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Communists used Washington and Lincoln as symbols in the 1930s.
Nazis used Washington and Lincoln as symbols in the 1930s.
It doesn't mean either man would have supported them.
The totalitarians just used symbols that would appeal most to Americans at the time.
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